Rocznik Historii Sztuki (46.2021)

42

PIOTR JUSZKIEWICZ

MERGING AND DIFFERENTIATING. ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHIC MODELS
OF MODERNISM IN POLAND
Summary
The main topic of this paper deals with the various historiographical models, the focus of which is or would be the history of Polish
modernism. The subject is complex because on the one hand it involves an adequate presentation of modernism as a universal phenomenon
characteristic of the entire European culture, and on the other describing and evaluating relations between modernism in Western Europe and
modernism in so-called peripheral countries, which at times includes Poland.
In the first instance, the text analyses those ways of approaching modernism which relinquish the comprehensive view of this artistic
phenomenon, arguing that its incoherence and paradoxical nature is its innate feature. In subsequent parts of the text, they are contrasted with
these research approaches, in which special attention was paid to the issue of historically preserved manifestations of the experience of mo-
dernisation processes. Of the proposals of a comprehensive approach to modernism, the author believes that the heuristic model developed by
the British historian Roger Griffin occupies a special place. From the latter’s point of view, modernism can be described as a multidimensional
reaction to the negative social experiences of the processes of rapid modernisation and to the feeling of an end of a civilizational stage which
must be followed by a “new beginning”. The result of this belief was a widespread movement of social reforms, in which art was to play an
important role, aiming at a manifold regeneration of the world and the creation of a New Man and a new living space for him.
Secondly, when analysing the relations between Western European modernism and the modernisms of Central and Eastern Europe,
the author takes up Andrzej Szczerski’s suggestion for a better appreciation of these “peripheral modernisms” through a more historically
adequate view of the local modernisation efforts, and his reference to Kenneth Frampton’s idea of critical regionalism as an inspiration for
the study of Central European modernism.
As a result, what emerges from the text is a historiographical project that would be based on the model of modernism as a set of criti-
cal reactions to modernisation processes, combined with faith in the regenerative effect of art, and Frampton’s idea of a specific mediation
between the universal and the regional.
Transl. Katarzyna Krzyżagórska-Pisarek

BIBLIOGRAFIA
Bolecki Włodzimierz, Modalności modernizmu. Studia, analizy, interpretacje, Warszawa 2012.
Griffin Roger, Modernism and Fascism. The Sense of a Beginning under Mussolini and Hitler, Basingstoke 2007.
Juszkiewicz Piotr, Cień modernizmu, Poznań 2013.
Modernism. Designing a New World. 1914-1939, red. Christopher Wilk, London 2006.
Szczerski Andrzej, Transformacja. Sztuka w Europie Środkowo-Wschodniej po 1989 roku, Kraków 2018.
The Cambridge History of Modernism, red. Vincent Sherry, Cambridge 2016.